Jank Mail: Kojima is coming

Another week has passed and we managed to fit two reviews into it, because that's the sort of thing you can do when you are powered by reader support rather than advertising. Brendy pondered the single innovative thing and the hundreds of non-innovative things in Sprawl Zero.

This isn't to say I had a bad time. I enjoy throwing chunks of concrete and rebar at the legs of my enemies. That's a good weekend. But I was never truly surprised. That's why I'm not worried about spoiling the plot for you, because if you've played any other shooter in the last 20 years, it basically spoils itself.

Meanwhile Nic judged Blood of the Dawnwalker, a good game that is nevertheless aiming higher than it can reach.

You could argue that just having the option to abstain from drinking humans and gorge on rats allows you to roleplay in ways that reflect your own morality, but I'd say that pales to how thematically incoherent and jarring it feels for Coen's vampirism - which he frequently laments to the point of tears - to mean functionally nothing to the player besides a happy power boost and some wicked-sick teleportation tricks. In dialogue, Coen is a broken, distraught man, racked with disgust at the monster he's become. In action, he gleefully pounds neck Negronis like Kain from Soul Reaver. You can even find the Blood Omen armour.

I have not played enough ZCOM to review it, or even really know what's going on to any degree of confidence, but I have played enough to demand voice adjustment in the character creator, because I simply have to create something goofy.

I would do this even if the character’s appearance is limited to a 32x32 headshot at the bottom of a stats chart, because vibe is important to me and sometimes the vibe demands an eyepatch, or high-piled set of dreadlocks, or a truly hideous jacket colour. The more serious the game, the more important this becomes: there is no text exchange about crop rotation or galactic diplomacy that cannot be improved by my character staring implacably ahead while looking like they were dressed by a five-year-old picking from the most cursed remnant rail in TK Maxx. 

Sin Vega's ongoing backlog safari took us to Northern Journey.

The world menaces with suspicious shapes and sudden terrors, and simultaneously invites with helpful weirdoes (who still have that "icy mountain climate" kind of grumpy madness) and gorgeously unphotogenic levels. No Great Evil has Corrupted This Land and Must be Cleansed (you fucking fascist), no Legends Tell Of or The Gods Decree. This is just what the world is. Not specifically hostile to humans but beyond us, and to understand it is to change somehow, and become part of it, refusing to catalogue or justify yourself. And maybe screwing with the overly inquisitive a little.

This week’s Total Playtime is another subscriber-exclusive gameshow in which we are forced to pitch new games to Games Satan while conforming to a strict budget, which introduces specific limitations.

Visuals
$5: Photorealistic, 8K, ray tracing, etc etc - basically indistinguishable from reality
$4: tastefully stylized 3D animation in any style of your choosing, but the artist has done very little to conceal their thumb fetish
$3: Crisp, indie darling 16 colour pixel art, but only visible if the player is wearing a proprietary 5kg iron visor
$2: Charming hand-drawn crayon sketches with occasional swerves into shocking tableaus of screaming skeletons and gore
$1: pure dark crimson on black text-based interface with migraine-inducing flickers

Plus, of course, Graham summarised some fine words and fine videogames you can spend your time on, and our ever-supportive community submitted still more in the comments.

Out there in the wider world, Nintendo announced some stuff and some reviewers announced that the Wolverine game ain't all that but none of that's on PC so we can safely ignore it. For us the relevant console news is that Kojima’s latest is coming to PC via Xbox after Sony ditched it for being weird, expensive and missing a lot of deadlines which is pretty much in the large print for any Kojima deal and shows how much money they must have lost failing to launch live service games.

Chet Faliszek says that Valve leaked the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer rather than deal with the ratings board. Double Fine’s first post-Xbox release is a game about driving a bus and slapping unruly passengers, which is the sort of public order focus I can get behind. Capcom said it’s going to do more remasters after Onimusha sold a million on day one, so cross your fingers for that Dark Void reboot. A rock guitarist interrupted their live set to bitch about the comments on their Fallout 4 mod, which is perhaps the least rock and roll thing to ever have happened on stage.

The new Halloween game patched out the bit where Donald Pleasance was having sex with 17-year-olds and I bet that did not get the Jira description it deserved. The next free update to Civ 7 will add atom bombs, the internet, and other marvels of the post-1950 world. FuturLab tried making something that isn’t Powerwash Simulator and it didn’t work out. 

Roblox games are escaping Roblox, so we get to see if they rage unchecked like viruses or die instantly on contact with the wider world, like the aliens in War of the Worlds. In other dystopia news EA might get merged with all the other stuff that Saudi Arabia owns, which is varying percentages of other companies and all of Monopoly Go and Pokémon Go, and that feels like something that Business Science should not start messing around with in case the microtransactions become self-replicating. Apparently Starfield is all Todd Howard’s fault. 

Ubisoft is “testing” the ability to just launch your game rather than deal with its terrible platform. 100,000 people signed up to Netflix to watch GTA 6 footage before anybody else. You can now get that shelf in the background of YouTube videos as a Skyrim companion voiced by Matt Berry, which I can only assume is the result of a marketing brainstorm that ended at 3am or in a bar or both, and then made it through to delivery because everybody else was on holiday.

Let's see what the community thinks. Anosi appreciated Northern Journey.

Northern Journey really captures the feeling of the muted, quiet beauty of a rainy day. A bit sad, a bit cold, you kind of yearn for home but also don't want to not experience that moment.

Freedom's Flame mused on games as opiates, following a link in The Lie-In and the song Welcome Home Warrior.

I think you can design digital forms of self-expression that are genuinely fulfilling (even if they are based on combinatorics of static elements), but they require a certain degree of depth. Contrast Destiny Fashion, Fashion Souls, etc. with e.g. an Overwatch lootbox.

kstarling speaks to the issue of the moment, raised in the Blood of Dawnwalker review.

There are times when I have to take a moment and remind myself which one Supermassive Games is and which one Supergiant Games is. Something I'm sure both companies also bemoan from time to time!

That's it for this week. Go and play some PC games.